Playing away from home with Pentaho and Mondrian

Back in March, when I announced on this blog that I was going to set myself up as an independent consultant, I mentioned that I would be interested in doing some MDX work on other OLAP servers that support the language. Very soon afterwards I got an email from Nick Goodman at Pentaho asking me if I was interested in finding out a bit more about the open source OLAP server Mondrian and helping the open source BI community come to grips with MDX. How could I refuse?

Anyway, Nick pointed me in the direction of a very quick and easy to install demo of all of the Pentaho platform including Mondrian:

You literally download it (it’s about 100Mb), unzip it, click on ‘start-pentaho.bat’ and go to http://localhost:8080/pentaho/ and you’re there. Click on the ‘Steel Wheels’ sample and you can see demos of their reporting, olap and dashboarding tools. I’ve only really had a look at the olap stuff so far: in the Steel Wheels sample you click on ‘Pentaho Analysis’ and then ‘Territory Analysis by Year’ and you’ll see a pivot table (JPivot) and a graph; click on the MDX button at the top and you’ll see, and can alter, the MDX behind it. My first impression of this – and Pentaho Analysis is just rebranded Mondrian as far as I understand it – is just how conceptually similar it is to AS2K. Anyone coming from a Microsoft BI background will feel very at home with it. There’s a ton of documentation on Mondrian here:

Of course now I feel all guilty and adulterous (well, ok, not that bad) having strayed away from Analysis Services, but don’t worry – it will always remain my true love. But given that there’s such a shortage of people even in the Microsoft BI world that understand MDX I think there must be massive untapped demand out there for people who have cross-platform MDX skills: even though platforms like Essbase and SAP BW support MDX I’m sure you could count the number of Essbase and SAP BW consultants out there with anything more than a superficial knowledge of MDX on the fingers of one hand.

Public MDX and SSAS Training Courses

I'm running several SSAS, MDX and PowerPivot-related training courses through Technitrain in 2015. Check out the Technitrain course catalogue for full details, and to see other upcoming courses from the likes of Allan Hirt, Jamie Thomson, Andy Leonard, Thomas Kejser and others.

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As well as being a blogger, I'm an independent consultant specialising in Analysis Services, MDX, PowerPivot and DAX. I work with customers from all round the world solving cube design problems, performance tuning Analysis Services queries and calculations, writing complex MDX and delivering training courses, and I am happy to work on short-term engagements. For more details see http://www.crossjoin.co.uk